The Defense Department has reached a sweeping settlement with tens of thousands of people who were dismissed from military service because of their sexual identity, potentially paving the way for veterans to upgrade their discharge status and receive a range of benefits they had been denied.
The settlement, which the Pentagon agreed to late last week and was filed on Monday in Federal District Court in Northern California, must still be approved by a judge. It applies to a group of more than 30,000 veterans who received less-than-honorable discharges or whose discharge status lists their sexuality. Advocacy groups had filed a class-action civil rights lawsuit in 2023 alleging that the Pentagon had failed to remedy “ongoing discrimination” after the repeal of the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy more than a decade earlier.
Those who leave the military with less-than-honorable discharges usually do not receive all of the benefits they would have been eligible for through the Veterans Affairs Department, including health care from the V.A.’s hospitals and clinics, educational benefits and access to job networks.
While the Defense Department has taken steps under the Biden administration to upgrade discharges and restore benefits for L.G.B.T.Q. veterans, the settlement is expected to make the process much easier. It would also help former service members remove references to their sexuality from their discharge paperwork. If a federal judge approves the settlement, it will be binding by law.
When reached for comment, the Pentagon referred to the Justice Department, which declined to comment. The settlement was reported earlier on Monday by CBS News.
Sherrill Farrell, 63, a Navy veteran who is the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit, said in an interview that news of the settlement was “overwhelming.” Ms. Farrell, who is lesbian, enlisted in the Navy in 1985. She was outed by a bunkmate and kicked out of training after only 10 months as a fireman apprentice. Her dreams of following the footsteps of her father and grandfather by serving in the military were crushed, and she never applied for benefits.
“It wasn’t about the money,” Ms. Farrell said. “It was about human decency and treating people fairly, and the people that are willing to defend our country regardless of what their sexual orientation is or who they love.”
L.G.B.T.Q. service members who were open about their sexual orientation were barred from the military until 2011, when President Barack Obama repealed “don’t ask, don’t tell.” But the end of the policy did nothing to address the effects of it that tens of thousands of service members who were discharged because of their sexuality experienced.
Those whose discharges remain less than honorable are still denied full benefits. Their only option for upgrading their discharge is to petition individually, a process that can take over a year, according to the nonprofit legal services organization Legal Aid at Work, one of the groups that filed the lawsuit.
In other cases, even when a discharge is honorable, paperwork can out veterans because it refers to them or their actions as “homosexual.” It might say that they “attempted to engage in homosexual marriage,” Elizabeth Kristen, a lawyer with Legal Aid at Work, said in an interview.
After the class-action lawsuit was initially filed in August 2023, the Defense Department began what it called a proactive review of service members who were discharged during the era of “don’t ask, don’t tell.” That review concluded in October, and more than 800 service members who were kicked out had their discharges upgraded to honorable. It was the first time that the department had systematically reviewed discharges related to sexual identity.
But the settlement that the Pentagon agreed to on Friday would go even further, creating a streamlined process that would apply to more people in a larger time frame.
“What it says,” Ms. Kristen said of the settlement, “is that the word ‘homosexual’ being taken off your records, that should be essentially as easy as getting your name changed.”
Many veterans had no idea that there was a pathway to getting their paperwork fixed. Some, like Ms. Farrell, had felt shame and did not ask for benefits that they would have been entitled to, if not for a less-than-honorable discharge.
Ms. Farrell was openly lesbian when she enlisted, and she said she felt guilty for answering “no” to the application question “Are you homosexual?” It is the only time she recalls lying about her sexual identity, she said, because she knew her application would not have been considered if she had told the truth.
“I wanted to serve my country that bad,” Ms. Farrell said, choking up with emotion. “But because of my integrity and the way that I look at serving in the military, I kind of felt that they had a right to do what they did because I had lied.”
The settlement is one of several steps that the Biden administration has taken to remedy the effects of policies felt by L.G.B.T.Q. service members for decades. In June, President Biden offered clemency to some 2,000 veterans who were convicted of engaging in gay sex, which was outlawed by the military for more than 60 years, in order to address what he called a “historic wrong.”
